


chance is the only game I play with

by finsandfishes



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Mutant!Darcy, Mutants, backstories, kind of, supernatural going-ons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-03-31 22:52:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3996106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finsandfishes/pseuds/finsandfishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say that curiosity killed the cat. That's legit, as far as Darcy is concerned. She has the bad habit of getting into scrapes. One day, she might not be able to talk herself out of trouble but Darcy tries to not worry about that too much. Which might make her a little reckless. Well, at least she is in good company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Cat is Out of the Bag

They say that curiosity killed the cat. Which is a totally legit response. Darcy Lewis is certain that she will one day--hopefully, _only_ in the far off future—bite off more trouble than she can chew. And that would suck, she imagines. Darcy loves life a little too fervently for her to pay too much attention to the numerous distasteful ways that she could die _but_ she is fully aware that she has stretched her streak of luck a bit thin. 

She tries not to worry about that too much. But one day, she won't be able to saunter her way out of trouble. 

Everybody dies. Unless they are a god—or a goddess. Or an alien. Some of those species have unnaturally long lifespans, but that’s by human standards. Everyone’s different. Even on Earth. 

There are the regular human beings. There are superheroes, villains and mutants. And then there’s Darcy. Darcy isn’t exactly sure what she is. 

She’s—different. She’s never heard of a mutant who died and came back to life again. Darcy’s died three times. Once when she was a little kid. She had been crossing the street and a driver had come out of nowhere. It’s hard to forget such a collision. He probably was drunk. The guy didn’t even stop to see what he had hit. 

Then there was the time when Darcy had been mugged. That ugly incident had taken a turn for the worse. She’s taken to carrying a tazer with her ever since. If someone’s going to try to kill her, she's definitely going to make them regret it. 

And then there was… well, Darcy doesn’t like to remember that one. It had been a particularly gruesome death. 

But Darcy is willing to agree that she is mutant-ish. She has a long silky cat tail. It reminders her of those Persian cats—all about the fluffy bulk and substance which makes wearing skinny jeans an impossibility. 

Darcy prefers knee-length skirts but that is only because she hates binding her tail. Skirts are a little more lenient when it comes to hiding stuff like that. And it is not like Darcy wants people to know about her abnormality. She’d probably be dissected if someone found out that she had nine lives to lose. 

Well, the truth is that she hopes that she has nine lives to lose. She doesn’t have anything _proper_ to support her reasoning—but she has died three times already, and she is still breathing—and has a tail, which sometimes seems to have a mind of its own—and there is the saying that cats have nine lives, so Darcy refuses to stress about it. 

Which is probably why she seemed abnormally calm during the giant killer robot incident. But hey! That puppy got out of that chaotic mess—and seeing as there is no way that dogs have nine lives—well, Darcy feels like she did her good deed of the month. 

Risking herself for a small puppy was very…heroic? No. Respectable? Probably not. She technically stole that puppy from the pet shop. Kind? Yes. And that will have to be enough. What is done is done, after all. 

And she should be grateful that those jack-booted thugs didn’t discover her tendency for not staying dead. It was a blessing that they didn’t find out about her tail. 

But Darcy is different—which explains why Jane is staring at her with wide eyes, and oh. Something’s wrong. Isn’t it? Did she somehow step on a wad of toilet paper and drag it out of the bathroom? She can barely feel her feet in these horrid high heels. 

Darcy looks down at the bottom of her skirt, which is _way_ shorter than it had been last time—probably a mishap with the washing machine—and she can see a good 10 inches of her fluffy tortoiseshell tail peeking out from underneath her ruffled gray skirt. Opps. 

“I guess that the cat is out of the bag,” Darcy sheepishly jokes. 

“I—it’s moving!” Jane stammers. “It’s a cat tail and it’s swaying and its--” 

“Doing cat-like stuff,” Darcy interrupts with a sigh. “It’s almost like the silly thing has a mind of its own.” 

Jane sighs. Her slender fingers nervously flutter, tracing patterns on the rather large, baggy flannel shirt that she is wearing. 

“It’s real?” She sputters. 

Darcy shrugs. “I was born with that tail. It drove my parents up the wall,” she says. 

Jane winces. “Oh, that’s awful.” 

“It may be hard to imagine but tails can cause an awful lot of trouble,” Darcy mutters, feeling slightly bitter. She watches Jane out of the corner of her eyes. Jane looks a bit shocked, a bit—well, Darcy doesn’t understand all of the emotions that are running across her friend’s face. But Darcy doesn’t see disgust. Her shoulders relax slightly. She doesn’t feel so tense now. Despite all appearances, Darcy does care about whether the Boss Lady thinks well of her. 

“Does anyone else know?” Jane asks. 

“Well, you know how we were late for that meeting today? And remember how, by some terrible stroke of luck, all of the coffee machines in the tower were broken?” Darcy sheepishly says. 

“Yeah?” Jane drawls. 

“I don’t really—I don’t do so well in the mornings without my daily cup of coffee.” Darcy admits. “Now I know why all of those people were staring at us.” 

“I didn’t notice either.” Jane admits. 

“In our defense, it was quite early.” Darcy says. 

“I just thought that we looked really good--” 

“Thus, the staring.” Darcy interrupts. 

“Yeah.” 

Darcy bites her lip. “Well, I guess that explanation is as good as any,” she says with a small smile. 

“Are you upset that everybody probably knows?” Jane hesitantly asks. “I mean, you know how rumors spread in the tower.” 

Darcy tries to nonchalantly shrug. “Well, I do feel a bit panicked.” 

Jane slowly nods. “I am willing to follow your lead on this. But, you know—Jarvis likes me. I could probably convince him to lie and concoct evidence that everybody in the building was hallucinating that you have a tail.” 

Darcy grins down at the floor. “Yeah, that’s a good thought,” She bashfully says. 

“I regret to inform you that Sir has already learned about your tail,” Jarvis helpfully interrupts. “He has seen all of the video footage but has instructed me to scrub the footage clean.” 

Darcy huffs. “Tony’s never going to let me forget this. Is he?” She asks plaintively. 

"Sir has been acting unnaturally subdued about it," Jarvis confesses, "But no, such things go against his nature." 

“If it bothers you, we could leave the tower,” Jane quickly says. 

“Yeah, that seems like an overreaction.” Darcy sighs, “You have everything that you could possibly need here. It’s kind of the perfect location for everyone.” 

“Still…” Jane argues. 

“You have all the funding that you could possibly need for your exploits into science,” Darcy debates. “And then we are living in the tower, rent-free. I really don’t know what Tony was thinking when he extended that deal to me. You, I can understand. He wants you—the hot and insanely smart girlfriend of Thor—to live in perhaps one of the most secure buildings in the United States. Me? I’m just an intern.” 

“Well,” Jane says, her cheeks turning a bright red. “I may have insisted that you get the same protection. You are my friend. I really dislike thinking of what my life would be like without you.” 

Darcy’s mouth drops open. 

“But you quickly won the Avengers over on your own merit!” Jane loudly protests. “They all seem to like you a lot!” 

“I think that it is a bit of a leap to say that Dr. Banner likes me.” Darcy says. “He always seem to scuttle away from me like I am a carrier of the bubonic plague.” 

“No,” Jane argues, “He likes you. He thinks that you are a swell person to be around. But you are a bit loud and well, sometimes, I think that you and Tony Stark are related. You guys have some pretty _familiar_ mannerisms.” 

“My Dad was a farmer from Idaho,” Darcy weakly protests. Though really, she has her doubts. Her Dad always seemed to treat her like she was the snake hidden in the grass. He had never been fond of her. 

“Whatever you say,” Jane says, with a sigh. 

“Sir wished for me to remind you that you signed a contract. These rooms do belong to you for the remainder of your life,” Jarvis adds. 

“Wha—what?” Darcy sputters. “I think that I would know if I signed something like that. I _always_ read the fine print.” 

“There was a lot of paperwork, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis says. 

“Oh yeah, there was,” Darcy sighs as she remembers the gigantic stack of paperwork that she had been filling out when she and Jane first moved in. It makes sense that some details may have snuck past her. 

“How are we going to handle this?” Jane asks. 

Darcy kicks off the uncomfortable high heels. She sighs. “Well, Jane. I’m not really sure.” 

“Want me to go to my apartment? I can grab the boxed wine?” Jane suggests, a tinge of hopefulness in her voice. 

Darcy grins. 

“We can figure this all out in the morning,” Jane adds. 

“Really, Jane?” Darcy jokes. “I thought that you weren’t found of my procrastination tactics.” 

“I’m not,” Jane says. “But sometimes, it’s okay. And you know, this doesn’t change anything between us…right?” 

“Don’t worry,” Darcy says. “We’re good.” 

“Good,” Jane firmly says. She heads toward the door; presumably to retrieve their supply of boxed wine. 


	2. Monsters

It is hard for Darcy to sleep. Nightmares creep in the shadows of her bedroom, in the living room, hallway—they are determined to follow her wherever she goes. Her monsters have no claws that go click-ity-clack on the beige tiled floor. They are not made of slime, nor do they ooze blood. They cannot swallow her whole like a stereotypical childhood monster, fond of hiding in closets or underneath beds. 

Her monsters aren’t mythical creatures. They are people—who have ordinary outsides, who don’t look different in comparison to the mundane. 

They are monsters that didn’t seem to care about broken bodies lying on the streets below them. Their jeers still echo in her ears. Darcy has abnormally good hearing. She wants to forget—oh god, why can’t she forget? Why can’t she sleep peacefully? She _needs_ sleep. 

She hears Thor’s soft rumbling and Jane’s hushed whispers. It’s enough to send her racing for her white fluffy robe, then out of her bedroom door. She tiptoes towards the door of the apartment. 

“I know that it’s idiotic but I can’t take her with me now,” Jane mutters. “That stupid country has awful regulations about mutants and I know that Darcy has been hiding for ages but what if they found out about her? They could, I don’t know—kill her or _something_ and that would be absolutely horrid and they don’t even conduct trials for mutants! It’s more like a great example of the Salem Witch Trials and that was a messy historical event! Innocent women and children had been killed! And--” 

“We don’t want to risk losing Darcy,” Thor interrupts, his voice soft. 

“How should I phrase it so Darcy won’t be upset with me?” Jane cries. 

Darcy flinches, slowly turns the knob and then pulls the door open. She slips out through the open door, and then carefully nudges the door shut. 

It loudly snaps shut. Darcy flinches. 

She cocks her head to the side. But she hears nothing of interest. Jane and Thor continue talking. It is almost as if they didn't hear her leave the apartment. 

Darcy sighs, as she turns away from the door. She then saunters towards the elevator. If she’s lucky, Steve might be hanging out on the shared floor. His insomnia is nearly worse than hers. 

He might feel inclined to play a few rounds of Mario Kart with her. There’s nothing like a good round of Mario Kart to get one’s mind off of a bad dream. 

She presses the elevator button. It seems to take a century to arrive. But when Darcy steps in, she feels comforted by the soft warm lights of the elevator. The soft classical music playing in the elevator is like a lullaby. It seems to take forever for the elevator to reach the 61st floor. 

Darcy finds herself sinking down towards the floor. She pillows her head against the crook of her arm, and before she knows it, she is fast asleep. 

The elevator doors finally open. 

Darcy doesn’t see Tony looking down at her, his eyes sparkling with bitter amusement. She doesn’t see him head for his bedroom or how he returns with a large fluffy comforter dragging behind him. 

She doesn’t see-- or feel him--drape the fluffy comforter over her prone form. She also doesn’t see him messing with the elevator controls, causing the elevator to remain immobile. 

If Darcy were awake, she would be curiously asking the mad scientist about how he was able to move so silently. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited to the best of my ability. If you catch any mistakes, I would appreciate you pointing them out to me. I am eager to improve!!


End file.
